Facilitating Opportunistic Communication by Tracking the Documents People Use
Workshop on Awareness and the WWW, held at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'2000), (2000)Abstract
Many of our conversations are not planned. Instead, they
arise opportunistically as we become aware of the common
interests and goals of others. We believe communication
tools can be built that leverage knowledge of a user's goals
and activities to make users aware of others relevant to
them and their work, with the aim of facilitating this kind of
opportunistic interaction. We describe a prototype system,
I2I, that helps people establish communication while they
are manipulating related documents by embedding
awareness and communication facilities directly into
everyday document manipulation applications. I2I
automatically clusters the documents users are manipulating
based on their content, grouping related documents into a
single conceptual space. It then makes the common work
contexts of users visible by displaying only those users who
are manipulating related documents. I2I also allows users
to initiate conversations asynchronously through a facility
we call calling cards. In these ways, I2I provides users with
opportunities to communicate within the context of the
activities they are performing in their primary application,
without requiring they manually orchestrate the
communication themselves. Once users become aware of
each other, they can use the system to communicate using a
variety of interactive modalities.
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